Pay the Piper (34 page)

“Thank you very much for waiting until I'm nearly fifty-three years old to do this,” she said.

“Oh, are you that old?”

The damn little bastard knew exactly how old she was, or ought to. She returned to her room and closed the door. She might as well now tell her mother this trouble. “Even I,” Mrs. Wynn said, “never thought Hal would do something like this.”

Before going out, he came into the kitchen wearing his navy blue Balmoral and carrying the case with his bagpipes. Hal outlined his plan. He would stay in the house until the divorce was over and then he would buy out Laurel's half. She said, “In other words, you plan to exactly copy William. Don't you remember saying when William stayed in the house during our divorce, it was the most unmasculine thing you'd ever heard of?”

“The difference now is, Laurel, there's no one who cares anything about you,” Hal said.

15

After the night he held her in the bathroom, Laurel decided she would live with Hal knowing he might kill her. She would only be more wary, she would only be more prepared. No man was ever going to rattle her brains again, striking her across the head. Not unless she stuck a knife through him afterward, or killed him somehow.

After that night, a different silence had existed between them. Not only had she known Hal might kill her, he knew it too. She was a living daily reminder of his past. When she said, “This time you'll go to prison forever,” it was as if she had screamed, “This time.” Up here in the East, while a few people knew about his prison record, it was not like living where things had happened, it was not like living where people who were involved, one way or the other, were around: people who chose sides, people who condemned. While she attempted to bury his past inside herself, she could not bury the present, that he might kill her. Hal knew that, and it was partly why he left.

Laurel believed this for the three years she had been alone. She who was always so attuned to silence was being driven stark raving mad by it sometimes. Never for a moment had she adjusted to living alone, to a house where no one else was coming, where no one else lived. Today she received a package from Frederick's of Hollywood and watched UPS drive away, thinking of the absurdity of having sent for a bra, one which cost twenty-five dollars and which, as a divorcée, she could not afford.

In the silence of this house, yet another rented house in Soundport, she walked about in the mornings talking to inanimate objects, in order to hear a voice. She would not succumb to morning television, even the news, not wanting to grow dependent on those cheery faces as companions. She was afraid of continuing to sit there and end up looking at shouting, mindless people on game shows. Going about these days, she wore indoors a paper cigar band on the appropriate finger, like a wedding ring. It was her talisman, she decided, the day she found it on a sidewalk. To wear it would mean she would find someone again. She took it off at home only to bathe.

To the house's silence she had said, “You are dark now, but you won't be when the leaves are off the trees, will you?” To a woodpecker busy at the shingles, she said, “Shoo. What are you doing up there?” And she asked her jade plants, “Have I watered you too much?” In a diary she had begun keeping she wrote:

Hal has stripped me of everything I had, was used to, was entitled to expect—my whole life-style: a large house, married couples as friends, animals, a sense of continuity, progressing on toward old age with a sense of peace, companionship. If anything, I know I am going to die this way of loneliness. The eternalness of getting up and going to bed alone. Solitude! So much. I don't think I can bear it much longer. I'm not such a bleeding heart anymore. I gave everything of myself I had to give and got in return a roof over my head, three squares a day, and shit. The only consolation I can find is, Sallie got a lot worse.

Feeling her life was in order, she looked over into it as from the edge of hell. She had done all she knew to do; she had tried. She made an error that indeed might be a fatal one: she sold the house she got in the divorce, and with a second mortgage. She was so innocent as not to know a house was something you took off on an income tax, and now she had nothing to declare. Then she moved to Delton. Delton!

Was the past never to be repaired? She fled from there in a year. She would have fled sooner had she not had a year's lease on a condominium. Coming back to Soundport, she liked the first little house she rented. Then unexpectedly the landlord wanted it back for himself. Even her sudden tears did not get him to change his mind. She cried more easily than she used to. She would never forget the torrent of tears that Hal unleashed. It shocked her still, because they seemed to be over something deeper even than his treachery. Deeper than over the future she knew she would have. She was still shaken to her roots by it.

Laurel liked her house by the beach now, overlooking the Sound. But she could not afford to go on paying over a thousand dollars a month, with an increase yearly. Plus utilities, she reminded herself. She had dealt with so much alone since Hal left, she was more astute than she once was. She was less idealistic than before, too, about the human race. Too long she had believed in good in people. God knows, she had learned there was no one to depend on but oneself, certainly not real estate brokers, lawyers, bankers, people she turned to selling her house. I'm screwed. Her mother cried out about that house, “It was falling down around you.” It was mine, Laurel thought. Because of the second mortgage, she had no money to put down on a small house. Prices kept rising. No, from now on she could only be a renter, money thrown out the window. And soon she could not afford Soundport; what then?

For so long, it seemed her breasts were like apples, like a young girl's. Since they had fallen, they were rounder and softer and seemed larger. But who was she to capture with this bra, or who did she want to capture among the kind of men she met?

When the telephone rang, she was glad; the voice of a solicitor, even, was a welcome one from the outside world, even if she was writing. She kept on writing. When that stint was over, there was the silence of no one coming home, there was the night ahead. The only solution was to get a full-time job, but what could she do—be a saleswoman? Her friend Chris was calling. Her mother was always asking where she met the strange men she met. But she did not want to make her life among women. If that was an unpopular idea with feminists, she was sorry. But she was doing feminist things when she didn't know what a feminist was, when she had never meant to be any kind of leader. She had struck out from home, she had traveled around alone, had an abortion when it was not acceptable or easy, been one of the first women to publish a story in
Esquire
, gone off and left her husband and child. She had rather go out to dinner with a man and was grateful for each invitation. At sixty, Chris was an unpublished writer and was happy about that. He would go on suffering and writing in a shabby room without water. He took showers about town, at tennis clubs, or at the Y, insinuating himself in. Last night he had taken a shower at her house before their usual Dutch treat date. He always wanted to see porno movies in Bridgeport, and they had a sandwich afterward.

“How'd you like the movie last night?”

“Boring,” she said. “I'm tired of looking between legs into vaginas and at engorged, purple cocks.”

“I know, but this morning it turns me on. If I came over, would you blow me?”

“Hell, no.”

“Have you got time to hear a fantasy?” This, too, was part of their palship, and she picked up a magazine and said, “Yes.” She propped onto her knees a copy of
Hers
. It was ridiculous she tried so late in time to hop into the world as a fast-paced journalist, hailing cabs and having a lot of appointments. Her agent got her an assignment at her request. “Living Alone at Thirty and Liking It.” She found young women she interviewed beginning to worry about their “biological clocks running out.” None of them had seriously interesting or important careers. She told them giving up being a wife and mother was not worth it. They had begun in their hearts to agree. However, they couldn't find anybody to marry and blamed the Women's Movement. It had messed things up quite a bit. They couldn't subjugate themselves to men. Then they would have a hard time marrying, she had thought. Couldn't they pretend awhile? Past their own generation of men, the young women believed things would be better. They had grown up with mothers being at home. Laurel's generation, they meant. No sense telling them she had “done something.” She'd just always been around to dispense lemonade also. Maybe Rick had not fallen in love seriously because he could not connect to a woman not content with house, kids, dog.

Laurel turned a glossy page of
Hers
. She had failed at the article she tried because she could not write glib, racy copy. Rick had said, “If you were a girl, would you consider me a hot marriage prospect? Both my parents have been divorced twice. My mother married a convict.” She looked back to the couple she and William once were and doubted William understood anymore than she did how their images had changed. Rick had said he would make it because of the first twelve years of stability he'd had—that part of his childhood had been, to him, nearly perfect.

“Hell, you've got to make it, boy,” she had told him.

“Are you still there, pal?” Chris's voice was hurried.

She doubted Chris could get it up in person and was never going to find out. “And you take my cock in your mouth. It's big and throbbing. You stick it up your pussy. I'm getting really turned on. My pants are open. In and out. My cock is shoved inside you. You're hot and ready. Now, we've come. Did you come?”

Laurel read the headline of a paragraph in the magazine. “Breasts Are Out in the 80s. Bouncy Beautiful Bottoms Are In.” So much for Frederick's. “Yeah.”

“You hang in there, pal,” Chris said, signing off.

She tried on the bra; under a sweater it looked as if she were wearing two inverted ice cream cones. Laurel stashed it back in the box. “I'm not going to any more new singles groups,” she told the house's silence.

Hal had been married for three years, and here she was still seeking, floundering and searching. Her novel came out, which changed nothing in her life. She thought back to Hal's moving and how his movers kicked about the manuscript, scattering pages. She had worked on a desk that belonged to him, and it was carted off. She had thought her pages safely set away, but they had not been. She did not know how she finished the book, being hit by a divorce in the middle of it, everything in her life scattered and fractured. Last Christmas Rick worried and said, “How much longer does your alimony last?”

“I got it for seven years and three are gone.” She thought of Hal's lawyer saying, “Rehabilitative alimony,” and remembered how Hal mumbled, “If she's getting the house, I'm not giving her anything else.” His lawyer had said, “She has to have it, Hal.” The lawyer would have known then what she found out later. As soon as the divorce was over, Hal sold his half of Matagorda and became an instantly rich man. He seemed to go on creating harm without anything touching him. Never once did he seem to understand he had done anything to her life.

When she thought about the circularity of things, Laurel was haunted. One day Hal had asked if she would be home that afternoon? Leery, she had said, “Why?” The sheriff was coming by to deliver divorce papers. She fled to downtown Soundport like a hunted animal—but when she came home, the papers were on the newel post. Afterward, notice of the divorce having been filed appeared in the local paper in Court Reports. There for all to see was the fact Hal was suing her for divorce, embarrassing for her and Rick in the town where they had lived so long. She'd have filed for divorce if he'd told her he wanted one. That day the sheriff came to see her, she thought about William's having been accosted at the railroad station, in the dark, and about William coming home laughing. She believed, this late, William laughed when he was hurt the most. No matter the circumstances, rejection hurt. She knew that hurt with Hal. The day they left the lawyer's, having discussed alimony, he curled his lip. “You took me to the cleaners,” Hal said. She had that curious sense again that he was oblivious to anything he had done to her, and she thought how she and William had never stopped suffering.

The day she told William she was married, he had come by her house to pick up clothes still stored in the attic, and he dropped an armload. He said, “Congratulations. You sure are a creature of impulse.” She had begun to cry and told him she was terrified about money since Hal had a year left in prison. “Don't let anything terrible happen to me,” she said. William had put an arm around her and promised. Then he said he would be up to his ass in debt buying the house back and asked her not to take much furniture, but her loyalty had been with her new husband. She had said, “I have to be cruel. Hal doesn't have money to buy any more, either.”

“Was it this guy's idea about the private detective?” William asked.

“I didn't even know Hal when I did that,” she said. She saw William realized how uncharacteristic of her the action had been, but William had not realized how desperate she had become.

“I'd have fought you tooth and nail about that divorce,” William said. “But I figured you had another guy, and in the long run I'd save myself some money. When I get married again, I don't care if my wife turns to stone, I'm staying at home. Middle-aged dating is for the birds.”

They were teary, saying they didn't know why they couldn't have worked things out. If they had been the people they had become, they could have. “There was nothing I could do about whatever it was that kept me from being able to make love to you,” William said. “As you know, I had a fantastic sex life and was a shit and screwed everything in New York while we were married. I look back and blame myself for the fatal error. I broke the promise and went right back to that girl within a week after we agreed to no more affairs. If I hadn't, I believe we could have made it. I blame myself entirely.”